Taxes: A Procrastinator's Guide

You have many options, and both of them suck.

By Zach Hively

We have less than a week until Tax Day here in the United States, which means it’s time for our annual set of Tax Preparation Options for our fellow procrastinators, ADHDers, and everyone else who also forgot about filing taxes until reading and/or writing this sentence.
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We have hardly any more time to put this off! So let’s get to it, right after we look at this historic print that is titled “The Moment of Imagination” but that we interpret as a man unable to free himself from his chambers until he finishes his taxes.

Published by W. George, London, 1785. [Free to Use and Reuse—Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.]

Option #1: PANIC and get those taxes finished just under the wire.

What wire? And why are we going under it? If it’s like a trip wire, which seems an apt metaphor for doing our taxes, isn’t it better to go over the wire, or around it, than to try and slip under it?
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These are the sorts of questions we have spent the last several months researching. Meanwhile, other people we have known have spent weeks doing their taxes. Not in the sense of “spending five minutes a day each day for several weeks to get everything in order in a manageable and unobtrusive way.” No: we mean literal weeks.

​These people we have known might be breathing easier right about now. So what? The rest of us have had the freedom to enjoy ourselves since January. We may not have ACTUALLY enjoyed ourselves since January, because we do things like looking up the origins of “under the wire” instead of having fun. But at least anxiously distracting ourselves into inaction beats doing our taxes.

Until now. Now that we are down to single digits of days, we have little choice but to continue delaying until April 15, or maybe April 14 if we are feeling particularly plucky. Panic is how we get things done. Anything. Ever. At all.

And our taxes will get done in those final minutes, because they have to.

Option #2: PANIC and still don’t get those taxes anywhere near any wires.

Let’s be real. This option might be more attainable for many of us. Especially those of us choosing—magnanimously, if we may say so—to sit here and write option trees for our fellow overwhelmed Americans instead of, say, cleaning the shed or practicing any of our myriad other procrastination techniques.

Of note: You might think this Option #2 is more practical during this year’s tax season than during any other tax season so far. You might argue that, what with the IRS workforce about to be reduced by 20,000 staff members, your odds of getting away with executive dysfunctioning your taxes are higher than ever before.

We cannot endorse such arguments. You see, we are not, legally speaking, qualified to comment with any authority or knowledge on this subject.

So maybe you should not listen to us when we say that forgetting to file your taxes—which may well be a felony, even with a really good excuse—sounds like a perfectly reasonable outcome for you to reach on your own personal tax journey, independently and without any input on the matter from us.

And you should definitely not listen to us when we say that you might reach this result (on your own!) for a number of reasons, among them because you find yourself suddenly, unexpectedly, and vertiginously pro-IRS at the moment, or because you just can’t even manage to do the dishes let alone interpret the entire tax code at this late moment in the tax season.

Your decisions here are between you, your family, and your official tax professional. We cannot inject ourselves in that choice. Besides, we are not quite sure how we got to this point—we certainly didn’t set out to go anywhere we might be held culpable!—so let’s hurry on over to

Option #3: There is no Option #3.

There could be, and if we were a legitimate tax-advice-dispensing entity there would be. But those of us who delay preparing our taxes until we have one final afternoon to decide whether or not we are preparing our taxes this year are not the sort of people who need more options.

Rather, we are the sort of people who need a clear and limited set of simple options for our panic to decide between. Because let’s face it: Once we learn we can file for extensions, nothing is getting done around here no matter what we say.